Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies pursuing digital strategies to improve or increase their top-line or bottom-line are finding that product (or raw materials) information management and the distribution / sharing of the information is crucial to the success of their strategy. This article looks at why you need a Product Information Management (PIM) system, the parallel concept of managing your product information supply chain and why understanding this concept will be crucial to the success of your digital strategy.

So what is a Product Information Supply Chain and how is it different than a PIM?

Let’s start with an acronym that we are familiar with today - PIM or Product Information Management. PIM (as defined by a recent paper from Ventana Research titled Streamlining Information for Consumer Goods) is the processes, information and technologies used to manage all of an organizations product information to conform to established formats and standards. PIM typically covers the following functional areas / capability segments:

Product introduction and maintenance

Hierarchies, Classifications and Taxonomy management

Media ingestion, management and correlation

Vendor / Partner Collaboration

Information stewardship and governance

Cross domain or multi domain relationship management

Global Data syndication

Each of these capability segments warrants an article by themselves – but the intent here is to look at the business needs that today's PIM solutions solve and more importantly shed some detail on how they are best suited for "within your four walls" situations. Specifically the four walls of the CPG manufacturer / supplier or the four walls of their B2B partners which could be traditional brick and mortar retailers, e-tailers, direct to consumer sites, marketplaces, etc. With the adoption of global data pools that follow standards like GS1 - suppliers are able to author their product information once and share multiple times (by way of syndication) to their B2B partners / customers - yet these partners spend an equal if not more amount of money, energy and time to re-arrange the information published to them - why is this?

The answer lies in understand that much like the "Merchandise supply chain" there is a parallel and (since the digital revolution) equally important "Product information supply chain". This information supply chain derives its characteristics from the lifecycle that the Product follows. The reason organizations redundantly expend time and money on managing product information within their four walls is due to the varying stages of the products lifecycle they are involved in.

The example above represents one of the many possibilities that could exist. What suppliers and their B2B partners do in this scenario versus if the selling was either direct to consumers or through internet retailers or marketplace are very different and silo-ed efforts – in many cases done by different parts of their respective organizations (Marketing vs Merchandising vs Store ops…). The net result is that each of these instances are being treated as separate individual (often redundant) product information flows when they really should be looked at from an integrated perspective that factors the gaps “within and between the four walls”.

The table below represents the supply chain that the product flows through B2B parties with the yellow highlighted showing how many more variations / permutations can spawn as a result of who is exchanging product information with whom and for what purpose.

Aligning ones product information management efforts around the products information supply chain can mean success or failure of your digital strategy because having the right product information available to the right constituent at the right time. Imagine the impact of your product not finding its way onto the first row and page of a google search performed for a keyword - could very well mean discontinuing that product.

Structured and Unstructured attribution and syndication – managing, correlating and sharing text, images, video, social and SEO at the right time in the products lifecycle to the right constituent (Not all these are available when introducing a product as an example)